09 April 2016

Storing and Retrieving Data from DNA Molecules

Researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft are developing one of the first complete storage systems to house digital data in DNA. The news comes as the digital universe is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.

“Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works. It’s very, very compact and very durable,” said co-author Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, in a press release.

“We’re essentially repurposing it to store digital data, pictures, videos, documents, in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years.”

The team of bioengineers and computer science and electronic engineers were able to encode data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets. This was achieved by converting the long strings of 1’s and 0’s in digital data into the four building blocks of the DNA sequence – adenine, guanine, cytosine and tymine. The synthesized DNA molecules were then dehydrated for long-term storage.

Miraculously, researchers then reversed the process by retrieving the correct sequence from a large pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information, according to the University of Washington.

To make it easier to find the images they had encoded, researchers put the equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequence to facilitate easier retrieval. Researchers also used Huffman coding for lossless data compression, according to Techworm.

“How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs and Ts really matters because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you don’t get a lot of errors,” said co-author Georg Seelig, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, said in the press release.

“If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes.”

Researchers were up against a punishing deadline. The world is producing data faster than it can create new storage. The digital universe – all the data contained in computer files, historic archives, movies, photo collections, plus the exploding volume collected by businesses and devices worldwide – is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020, according to the UW. That’s a tenfold increase compared to 2013.

Ceze and his team think they can go much further, moving on to store video and large digital files. They claim it could be possible to “shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.”

Researchers said DNA molecules can store information many millions of times more densely than existing technology for digital storage, such as flash drives and hard drives, as well as magnetic and optical media. Those systems also degrade after a few years, while DNA can preserve information for centuries.

Parrhesia

The two all-time most popular posts of Transudationism

A modern-day classic

All life is a form of light, and the cosmos is a holonic Holy Hologram.

Immanence ≋ Transcendence

Transudationism: mankinds' cosmic ideology.

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

Ascensional Transudation

Cosmic Evolution

All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's concluding thoughts from his 1978 Harvard address, A World Split Apart

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's concluding thoughts from his famous 1978 Harvard address,"A World Split Apart":

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but - upward.

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.

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MIdwest Book Review:

"The seed of the universe is the big bang, says Kyle McDermott in 'The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism'. An explanation of this view which holds that all of current humanity and life on Earth today was intentionally set in motion all those billions of years ago, 'The Declaration of White Independence' probes matters of cosmological significance with straightforward candor and accessibility. Featuring intriguing concepts and ideas, 'The Declaration of White Independence' is highly recommended for metaphysical studies shelves."

The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

and speaking of cosmic symphonies, Julianne Hough

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